32 THIS STRANGE COUNTR Y O N the train from New York I sat next to a young man \\lith a blue shirt and long black hair. I looked past him and out the window at factories and high chain- link fences, and then I looked at him again. He had pale, reddish-brown skin; he shook strands of hair from hjs face and smiled a little at me. His name was Jake San turi, he said, and he was going to Kingston, Rhode Island. lIe a<;;ked me where I was going. "Plovi- dence," I said. "And what's your name?" I said, "Daniel Francæur." He said, "You're not from around here. I can tell by the way you talk. \Vhy are you going to Providence?" "I'm going to visit friends," 1 said, then "relatives." The pupils and irises of his eyes were equally black. He said, "You ever been to Providence be- fore? " "Yes," I said. He told me that hIS father was Ital- ian, his mother was American Indian. He said, "How's that for a cOlnbina- tion " I smiled. "Where are you from?" he asked. 1 . d " L d " sal, on on. "In England?" "Yes," 1 said. "I just got here." His voice rose.. "Hey, you just got here? " "I come every two or three years on a visit." "1' d like to go to London," he said. "1 really would. LIfe must be different there. What kind of a life do you lead there? " "\Vhat kind of a life do you lead he re ?" 1 asked. \Vell, he didn't want to settle down, not yet-there was so much he wanted to do-but maybe when he did settle down he'd be a plumber or a welder or something like that, because he liked working with metal. He was almost eighteen; he had to start thinking about things like what he wanted to do. He'd got into some trouble, he'd spent two years in a reform school, but at eigh- teen you went to prison if you got into trouble. He had a friend, Rocco, in prison, and he'd visited him, and that was hell. He and Rocco and some friends, they used to do jobs for people who wanted to collect insurance on their cars, so these people would pay them, say, a hundred dollars to steal their cars and blow them up. He showed me how to make a time fuse with a ciga- rette and a book of matches. One time he took a car out into the country to blow it up, and Rocco was following him in another car wIth the gasoline, but he lost Rocco on the way, so he drove the car into a field, and he ripped up the seats with a broken bottle and stuffed the car with dry grass and set fire to it, then ran like crazy through the woods, but stopped to turn back to look and saw the car filled with flames, and, just then, hahroorn, the whole thing exploded, and he kept running, running like cr,lzy until he got ou t of the woods. He had to walk thirty miles into town. I said, "Aren't you afraid of the cops?" "Naw," he said. "They're so stupid. Rocco, he's my closest friend stIll, a tough guy, with thick thighs, a real good runner. Once, he put boards with spikes in them all around a field near his house, and he lit a fire in the mid- dle of the field just to attract the po- lice, and they came in there with their cars, and you could hear the tires bursting. The cops got out of their cars and tried to catch him, and he got them running around after him, and when one of them tried to head him off, he ran right past him, and his mother \\'as there, shouting, 'Run, l occo, run. Don't let them catch you.' " I said, "But Rocco got caught." Jake didn't say anything; he scratched his nose. I said, "You like taking risks." "Yeah," he said, "I like taking risks. I ride my motorcycle, boy, in a risky way. I've had some pretty close misses. I once drove off a cliff." He looked away from me and out the window. The train was passing a dump of crumpled, rusted cars pIled on one an- other. He looked back at the dump when the train passed it. He said to me, "I ran away from home once and lived in a wrecked Oldsmobile in a dump for three weeks. I'd take girls there. They'd say, 'Is this where you live ' I don't know why I ,UIIIIIIJlJlllr; --I I- ' kl -- tg. - T GVr\.. JANUARY 7, 1980 do, hut I like dumps with old cars. I like old railway yards, too. I like lum- beryards, and I like brick and cinder- block yards." I looked out the window with him. \Ve passed an old brIck factory, dere- lict, its smal1 windows broken, and among the weeds in the factory yard were rusted machine parts and by the railway tracks a heap of rusted metal, gears, shafts, flywheels. Jake said, "Hey, look at that" He turned to me. "I)id you see that? I really like metaL" I smiled at him, then again looked past him, out the window to a view of low gray-green land with dumped stoves and refrigerators, and, beyond, the gray ocean, where, upended in the wa ves, was the hulk of a battered tank- er, and I thought, This strange coun- try- Jake was studying me. I didn't look at him until he said to me, "My moth- er would like you. She likes people who are different. You like fish? How ahout coming to eat with us She'll make you a great fish dish." I asked, "Do you speak any Indian language? " He laughed. "Me? Naw." "Tell me in what ways you're In- dian. " "\Vell," he said, "all you have to be is an eighth Indian to be officially an Indian, and I'm half-" Then he laughed so that lines curved in his cheeks, and he said, "I don't know." Out the window was a sIngle square clapboard house and a row of trees in a field at the edge of the ocean; the white sun was high and the house and the trees and the field and ocean ap- peared plain gray. I said to Jake, "I want to tell you I'm not a foreigner." "What d'vou mean?" "I was born and grew up in Provi- dence. I left when I was your age." He glanced to either side of me, and after a moment he said, "That's all right, I'd still like you to meet my mother. Come to our house. She'll like you just the same." "Thanks," I said. "That's all right," he said. vVhen he got off at Kingston, I sat by the window and watched him de- scend from the train. He jumped over a low barrier to the station parking lot and lifted his old Army du ffelbag to squeeze between two cars. His long black hair swung. AS the train came into the station at n. Providence, I saw my brother Edmond on the platform, looking away. He had a bald spot at the top